


Down the Long Road, Your Hand in Mine

by ambiguously



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: 5 Things, M/M, May the 4th Treat, Old Married Couple, Reincarnation, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-05-04
Packaged: 2018-10-25 04:31:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10756758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambiguously/pseuds/ambiguously
Summary: Five lives Chirrut and Baze shared.





	Down the Long Road, Your Hand in Mine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fleurlb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleurlb/gifts).



1

In the first life, the first they could remember, they never met. A boy and a girl, so distant in the past neither knows who was who, were born on separate worlds, growing up under stars that were invisible to the eye from the other's home planet. The girl grew to a woman, and became an artist, carving poetry into stone. The boy was a soldier, conscripted to service from his youth, and sent to fight tiny wars over lands that sunk under the sea long ago. 

One night a year, perhaps two, the man woke from dreams of the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, although he could not recall her face. The same mornings, the woman pulled herself upwards from sleep with the memory of a lover burned into her throat where he'd pressed his dream lips. He chopped words into form, failing to capture her grace. She pulled the essence of his hidden face from granite. 

She took a wife, and so did he, and they were happy with their lives, except for on those few nights when the winds between the stars blew promises of untold adventures. They wondered what else could have been. 

They died on the same day, and no one ever knew what they saw when they closed their eyes for the last time. 

2

In the second life, they were born in different villages. Lura was five years older than Tana, and their families fought over water rights and old grudges. The girls grew to argue, until Tana took on the bloom of womanhood and Lura suddenly found her tongue unable to form the curses she'd been taught at her mother's knee. 

Their families would never approve the match, and would only use the other as another weapon in their pointless argument. Lura and Tana met by alluring moons-light, the favorite illumination for clandestine lovers. At their homes, their mothers fussed at them for staying out too late, and their fathers asked when they'd find a young man, and at night, they'd climb the hills away from their homesteads and discover new ways to kiss. 

At twenty, Tana was legally no longer a child. She attended her birthday celebration wearing the pretty robes her father had sewn, and she nodded along with the words that said she was a woman of her clan, full of the same rights and responsibilities as every other adult. She danced with her brothers and she hugged her sisters. When the sun set and the moons rose, she slipped out through the window of her house with a bag of clothes. Lura met her in the hills. By morning, they had reached the next settlement, and they did not stop their journey until the sea lay between them and their home. They never parted again. 

The house they built was not as grand as Tana's, nor as comfortably homey as Lura's, but they filled it with smiles, working their land and growing old together over slow decades. 

They died on the same day. When they were found, the two old women still held hands. 

3

In the third life, they were born into far different lives. Dev was the eldest son of a powerful family in the Deep Core. Kalan was the only son of a star-fisher, born between star systems in the spaces where the fishers spread their parsec-wide nets. Kalan developed the strangely loping form and huge eyes of the star-children, who'd never known a planet's gravity and never spent a day under a sun. Dev grew elegant and proud, learning the wiles of court and the means to manipulate handsome men and beautiful women into his sway. Dev climbed the walls of power as his mother did, taking on political posts and performing favors to step up and up again. Kalan learned to weave the energy nets, and sift through his microscopic hauls looking for the most valuable flakes of matter to sell. 

At night, once or twice a year, Dev dreamed of flinging off his grand robes and stepping nude into a pool of stars beside a perfect soul, gangly and strange and beautiful. Once a year, perhaps twice, Kalan forgot the battered hull of the ship he'd inherited, forgot the debris he called a daily catch, and in his dreams he was hand-fed succulent, savory treats by the long fingers of one who adored him. 

Dev lived to a great age, his schemes never catching up to trip him. He held the Senate seat of his system, and he passed it along to his daughter in her time. "I have a journey to take," he told her the last time they spoke, waking from his space-soaked dream and knowing this time he must go. 

Kalan's ship docked at the trader's port where he often sold his finds. As he disembarked to sell his wares, he saw the man from his dreams emerge from another ship, just in from the Core Worlds. Their eyes met. Kalan smiled, and Dev wept joyous tears. They never parted again. 

They died on the same day. The star-fisher's ship went adrift in the darkness between suns, and in all the years that have been and gone since, it has never come to another port. 

4

It was not the fourth life nor the fortieth nor the four hundredth. They were both born in the Holy City, separated by three streets and four years. Baze was the third son, another mouth in a poor family of seven, given as offering to the Temple of the Kyber after he was weaned. Chirrut was a foundling left on the Temple doorstep, never certain if he was an orphan or the product of some union too temporary to matter to his parents. The brother Guardians who raised him said the Force would be his parent. Chirrut believed them. Everyone said he was the most likely of all his young brothers to rise to the priesthood in due time. 

Chirrut lost his sight in an accident. He cried for an hour at the unfairness, until he heard another boy sobbing. Deciding at once the other child must have been injured far more, Chirrut challenged him to a game, shocking Baze right out of his guilty sorrow and into the best friendship of his life. When the Temple fell, Baze climbed into a bottle first, then into the next ship that would carry him off world. Seven years as a paid mercenary taught him that the Force was a lie and that all people were foul creatures just as he was. His feet were not yet dusty with the dirt of Jedha when Chirrut walked up to him and said, "You are late, Baze Malbus," before turning to walk away. 

Baze glared after him. "Someone told you it was me." 

"If you say so." Chirrut kept walking. Baze growled and followed him, muttering. They never parted again, no matter how often Baze threatened to go. 

They died on the same day. Their bodies were vaporized, and no one who knew their names survived to tell their tale. 

Pause, Breathe, Reset

This is not life. This is what comes between. A trillion billion souls pass through, awaiting the souls joined with them, those with whom they will always journey. Two luminous lights stop here for a moment, simmering in the lessons of lives just departed. One maintains a fundamental Bazeness, gazing around infinity with an unimpressed harrumph. "This again?" 

The other, made of laughter and hope, replies, "You were expecting Paradise?" 

The Force flows around them. Memories of Tana, of Dev, of friends and faces past recall, remind them of who they are. Others they have known stream past them, touching and splashing away again, leaving the pair within the restful island of the Force. At no signal heard outside the heart, they both understand their wait is complete. 

"Where are we going this time?" 

"The Force will know, and I will find you." 

Another harrumph. "I will find you first." 

5

In the new life, the child blinked open eyes still wet with her own birth. She cried to announce her displeasure at being taken from the warm, safe place she knew into this cold, bright strangeness. Voices she nearly knew murmured at her, kissing her head and stroking her cheeks. After a long, long time, she was set down into a soft place, wrapped in snuggling cloths. 

At the edge of the range of her blurry vision, a face came into view, red and wrinkled and equally unhappy with this state of affairs of being born. A burst of joy went through her, and she squealed. The other infant ceased crying at the noise, and stared at her, soft face gone wide and pleased, knowing her already. 

∞

They never parted again. 

end


End file.
